Mistakes to Avoid When Designing Your Website

It is a fact that anyone is able to build their own website. You no longer need to have any experience in coding or web design to create your own website easily. Yet, if you are approaching this process for the first time, there are a few guidelines that you might not be aware of. No need to worry about that, though. Nobody is ever born knowing this stuff.

iPage is ready to help you with all of the tips and tricks that you will need in order to build your first successful website. You will find all of the information you need in order to get started at http://www.ipage.com/wordpress-hosting. In the meantime, let’s take a look at some of the more common mistakes that people make when building their own business website.

Missing: Marketing Strategy and Business Plan

A website is not the Field of Dreams. They will not come just because you build it. Unfortunately, many people seem to have the opinion that people will flock to their site simply because it is there. This approach to website design can be very damaging to your business. Purchasing a domain name does not guarantee that you will have traffic. Before you invest a lot of money and time in a website, you need a marketing strategy and a business plan. These should answer the questions:

What services and or products will you be selling?

What is your target demographic and your niche market?

Which solution to the problems your customers have are you providing?

Who are you competing against and how will you capitalize on any weaknesses they have?

What will your presence online consist of?

When it comes to a marketing strategy, you need to have an ecommerce analytics and or tracking system in place. You also need to know the difference between PPC and SEO and know how important social media platforms are. Another good idea is to review research that has been done on affiliate marketing and think about selling your services and or products through third party platforms.

Tone it Down

It might be tempting to make your website flashy. It can also be easy to put too many things on the pages. This can be one of the top web design mistakes to make. However, you should focus more on the marketing of the website than on making it too flashy. The design needs to be focused on getting traffic to the site, but also on making sure that when they get there, they can find out where they need to go next.

Remember that most people are now using phones or mobile devices to browse the internet and flashy designs do not mesh well with mobile devices. Also, when people visit your site, they will more than likely already have a good idea of what they want to find or do. If it takes them longer than 3 seconds to determine what to do when they get to your site, they can lose interest and go somewhere else… meaning you just lost money.

eCommerce and Hosting Platforms Matter

There are many free hosting platforms to choose from, including Weebly and Blogger. When this is the case, why should you pay for one? The ones that are free are easy to set up and can be set up quickly.

That being said, there are quite a few issues when you decide to use a free hosting platform. To begin with, many people will not take your business seriously without your own domain name. Beyond that, there will be functions, like being able to connect with the various social media sites, that are not going to be available. Even worse, you will not own either the site itself, or the content it contains. With all of that being said, spending the few dollars a month that it will cost for a good hosting platform doesn’t seem to be too much of a hassle anymore.

As far as eCommerce software goes, look for services that are well known and have a great reputation, meaning they are tested and then updated regularly, such as Etsy or Shopify. You can get custom installation from some of the popular eCommerce software programs like Cs-cart, WooCommerce, or Magento.